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This pedagogical research project is driven by a dissatisfaction with how design research methods overlook the role of the researcher subject in relation to the object of research by subscribing to models of knowledge in which the researcher occupies a position of authority over the researched, and which assume that knowledge may be generated from a ‘neutral’ standpoint.

Inspired by the radical pedagogical strategies outlined by Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal, as well as those implemented in Zapatista communities, we have developed a series of projects and workshops that explore ideas within the realm of design education. In this broad project, our aim is work together with participants to unpack our positions as simultaneous observers and actors, situating ourselves and our research tools within the world we study. We explore the politics of artifacts, examine the power imbalances triggered by design decisions and suggest novel strategies for conducting research. In these experiments, we look into methodologies and strategies stemming from feminist, queer and decolonial studies, and assess how they might translate to a design context.

In Brazil, the Statute of the Unborn changes everything. Life is now legally defined as beginning at the moment of conception. Abortion has always been illegal, but now its definition is broader. The morning after pill and the IUD have been outlawed because they may prevent a fertilized egg from successfully implanting and developing. Even the birth control pill is now a highly controlled medication due to fears that it might be used – in higher doses – for the same purposes of the morning after pill.

Oniria is the first product to be released under the new legislation. Distributed through the country’s public healthcare system, Oniria consists of two parts: a small device which is clipped to the corner of the lips at night and tracks basal body temperature and hormonal levels; and an app that calculates when ovulation is supposed to happen based on the data collected by the device. The information is transmitted to the patient’s healthcare provider; in order to access this information, patients must contact their doctor. However, some premium versions of the product – not available in the public healthcare system – allow the patient direct access to their cycle data.

The “Ocupação Algerinha” or “Vila Algerinha”, formerly known as “Ocupação Dona Algerinha” was one of the biggest occupations in South America in the first decades of the twentieth-first century. During its five-year existence, the occupation was home to around 120.000 people, distributed over an area of approximately 1.33 square kilometers in Southeastern Brazil. The exact origins of the occupation are unknown, but it is believed that the families were initially part of a transmigrational group in Latin America which, in itself, was dissident from a larger group of families directly affected by the housing crisis that followed the wave of Coups d’Etat all over the continent. Due to increased incentives to real estate markets, progressive gentrification in big cities, and the suspension of most social housing programmes in South America, thousands of families – many of whom also unemployed – were forcefully expropriated from their homes, and hence started waves of peregrination and demonstrations all over the continent, particularly in the Southern Cone and Brazil.

“Sound as Violence, Sound as Dissidence” is an introductory workshop on the theme of violences performed with and through sound and listening. The session presents a series of two-minute soundscapes assembled from several sources (internet, archives, or personal recordings), mixed and composed specifically to highlight certain aspects of sounds that have been, still are, or might be deployed as instruments of political, social, and physical oppression.

Workshop for the CTM Festival 2017 in Berlin; held in collaboration with Leil Zahra-Mortada and Gabi Sobliye from Tactical Tech Collective.

A Yarn Session is a pedagogical endeavour we developed in the course of our PhD researches as a way to fostering a decentralised dialogue within and around designed objects and systems. To develop this format we looked primarily at Paulo Freire’s proposal for a Pedagogy of the Oppressed and its iteration in Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed.

Speculations on Birth Control was a project developed between 2015 and 2016. The idea was to collectively untangle the complex terrain of birth control devices and artefacts, discussing the role of design in the establishment of discriminatory regimes of birth control, and speculating on how might these regimes change in a near future – and for whom.

A Yarn Session is a pedagogical endeavour we developed in the course of our PhD researches as a way to fostering a decentralised dialogue within and around designed objects and systems. “Auditory Governances” is an umbrella name for a series of Yarn Sessions developed within the context of the “Algerinha Vive” project.

These Yarn Sessions aimed at using the Algerinha story as a platform upon which conversations, stories, propositions, and debates in and around the themes tackled by the story – racism, classism, migration, violence – all having sound and listening practices as the main threads of the narratives.

This is an experimental format for academic publications in/with/through sound, developed in Copenhagen in 2015 as part of the “Fluid Sounds, Fluid States” conference, and later edited in Berlin. The format follows insights I’ve developed in my article published in Design Issues. The “Audio Paper Manifesto” written by the organizers can also be read here.

This audio paper is an experimental fusion of Speculative and Critical Design (SCD) with sound-based research methods. It is part of an ongoing investigation into the politics of designing for sound, and its accountability for the configuration of violent soundscapes.

In Latin America, reality is always dangerously touching dystopia. Even though sometimes it feels that we are moving forward, violence and inequality keep pushing us back to realities much akin to our colonial past, and our history seems to repeat itself. The invasion of land, military coups, police brutality, violent regimes, and the genocide of indigenous and Afro-Latin peoples are all integral to the fabric of our reality. The cyclical nature of our history emerges as it becomes clear that the structures of power pushing us back to the past have, in fact, never left. We are left feeling like actors in a play, performing the same scenes over and over again.

Visual essay published in Spring 2016 at the special issue on ‘Mestizo Technology’ of the Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, Vol.12, No. 1. Full essay available in this link.

This article discusses how Sonic Fiction—a concept developed by cultural theorist Kodwo Eshun—can be regarded as a cogent mechanism with which to develop Speculative and Critical Design (SCD) projects, using subjects of sound, music, and listening as their driving force. Through a dissection of the base premises of sonic fictions, this article aims to expand the perspectives taken so far by SCD projects in order to encompass languages other than those informed by the usual theories, as well as to broaden the spectrum of possibilities for sound-based practices within the field. In doing so, it suggests sonic fiction as a decolonial epistemology for assessing design questions.

Public spaces are systems constructed for things and people to fit in. Whenever these systems are upset by glitches that expose faults in its structures, reveal the fragility of its foundations, crack its thin, protective walls, said glitches are immediately alienated, excluded or confined to the farthest corners of society. Within those glitches, combinations of nationality, gender, race, class, language fluency and economic power form an unsettling recipe for the interplay of social friction. Who is welcome and who is undesirable? Who and what belongs to certain social spaces, and who and what do not?

Speculative design is going through a troubled adolescence. Roughly fifteen years after interaction design duo Dunne and Raby first started talking about “critical design”, the field seems to have grown up a bit too spoiled and self-centered. Being a fairly young approach to product and interaction design, it seems to have reached a tipping point of confusion, rebellion, contrasting opinions and confrontations. Presently, from practitioners to theorists there seems to be little consensus about what the field is able to offer – and whether it is of any use at all. In this article we hope to pinpoint some reasons why this is so, while at the same time offering not possible, plausible or probable but preferable developments for the field.

Design and decolonising imaginaries, Lecture at the “Situated and Translating,” Conference, HFBK Hamburg (Germany). March 2017.

Design and Intersectionality: Material Productions of Gender, Race, Class and Beyond, Opening lecture by Luiza Prado and Ece Canli, for the Intersectional Perspectives on Design, Politics and Power Symposium. School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University (Sweden). November 2016.

Metamorfoses: Por uma Descolonização do Design, Panel Presentation at Encontros do Design de Lisboa, University of Arts Lisbon (Portugal). November 2016.

Whose Gadgets? On the Distribution of Futures, Keynote Presentation at the Royal Academy of the Arts The Hague (Netherlands). December 2015.

Bubblegum futures: Speculative Design, Gender and Colonialism,Lecture by Luiza Prado at the Design Festival, Goldsmiths University London (UK). September 2015.

This is a series of objects that confront and reclaim sonic space. It starts from a very simple observation: that silence is never a dialogue, but an imposition. Silencing is an attitude observed in a lot of instances in society, but more often than not it concerns issues of gender, class and ethnicity. Latin americans in the US, turkish and middle-eastern people in northern Europe, women in general – these are all subjects of constant angry looks, reprimand and shushing. We are constantly deemed as “loud”, “annoying”, “uneducated” and other less friendly adjectives.

These objects are meant to allow a reconquering of this stolen sonic space – and they do so by also occupying physical space.

Earlier this year we published a text on Medium which, apparently, said a few things that resonated quite well among design practitioners and researchers alike. In that text, we pointed out a general disregard for issues of race, class and gender privilege within Speculative and Critical Design projects and publications. For us, it was a serious problem we felt the need to call out. However, SCD projects and publications are still letting plenty of “narrow assumptions” sneak in, and they will only continue to reinforce the status quo of colonialism and imperialism rather than effectively challenging it.

To try to make things a bit easier, we developed this very simple and straightforward “Cheat Sheet” you, Speculative and/or Critical Designer, should consult when developing new projects. We strongly believe that following these simple steps may positively contribute to not only Speculative and Critical Design projects becoming more powerful in their line of questioning, but also avoiding the mishaps it sets itself up so boldly to criticise.

Though critical and speculative design have been increasingly relevant in discussing the social and cultural role of design, there has been a distinct lack of both theory and praxis aimed at questioning gender oppression. Departing from an intersectional feminist analysis of the influences and origins of speculative and critical design, this essay questions the underlying privilege that has been hindering the discussion on gender within the discipline and its role in propagating oppression; it then goes on to propose the concept of a “feminist speculative design” as an approach aimed at questioning the complex relationships between gender, technology and social and cultural oppression.

This is a transcript of Luiza’s paper presentation at the Design Research Conference 2014 held in Umeå, Sweden. The full version of the paper can be downloaded as part of the Proceedings here or individually here. This research is funded by the Brazilian Council for Research and Development (CNPq).

As a South American researcher within Sound Studies I often find myself sitting through lectures, symposia, presentations, performances and conferences about silence. Researchers are talking about silence in a very patronizing, eurocentric and northern-centred way — and because of that, creating a very dangerous dichotomy between “silent” and “noisy” societies. For these societies built on practices of colonization of the other, and yet very fearful of them, silence is not only a commodity but a private property, and as such protected by the capital. Exerting auditory control over oneself, be it by actively crafting one’s own soundscape or passively by silencing the other, is a strong form of aggression and oppression. People assume that there is a “right to quietness” but more often than not forget to ask whose quiet is meant in this right.

Inspired by the tense political and social ordeal happening in Brazil as of 2013-14, we decided to develop a Workshop specifically aimed at brazilian designers. We were given the opportunity to make this workshop happen in three different settings (at a University, a NGO and at a design studio) and in two different formats (twice as a hands-on workshop and once as a round table). This diversity of formats and places surely made the discussions very different from one another and provided several perspectives on the subject. We think that this exchange of opinions, and, most of all, the possibility to talk openly about politics in different contexts in which the social role of design is often taken for granted is the most powerful outcome we could expect from this firs installment of our research.